Angela Merkel is Europe's last leader standing. The German chancellor will soon announce she will be seeking a fourth term in next year's election. Not so long ago it seemed that she might be unseated by the migrant crisis as Germany's anti-immigrant populists - Alternative for Germany - took to the streets. Now, with a Trumpian storm rolling across the Atlantic, Germany, and Europe, seem unimaginable without her.
Ms Merkel's carefully conditional reaction to Donald Trump's victory voiced what most European leaders think but are too fearful to say about the US president-elect. Her words bear repetition. "Germany and the US are tied by values. Democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law and the dignity of humankind - independent of origin, skin colour, gender, sexual orientation or political views." Berlin would work closely with the new administration, she said, "on the basis of those values".
Visiting the German capital this week, I caught the mix of pain and resolve conveyed by the chancellor. Pain because Germany sees itself as the guardian of the postwar international order so disdained by Mr Trump. It has not forgotten what came before. And Ms Merkel, born in the then communist east, knows all about freedom. Resolve because this Germany and this chancellor will not pay fealty to the president if his agenda is written by white supremacists.
It was left to Boris Johnson, Britain's inestimably silly foreign secretary, to offer a counter view. Mr Trump is an opportunity, he boomed. The president-elect has promised to dissolve the transatlantic security relationship, strike a dirty deal with Russia's Vladimir Putin, and derail the global trading system. Yet, even as the geopolitical plates crash and grind, Mr Johnson declares all to be well: Mr Trump might favour Britain with a post-Brexit trade deal.
The less palatable strategic reality is that, as a European power with widely scattered global interests, Britain relies more than most on a rules-based order to underwrite its prosperity and keep the peace. Mr Trump says he has had enough of this "globalism", and will replace it with "Americanism". This at the moment Britain is marginalising itself in Europe.
It was scarcely surprising then that Barack Obama chose Berlin for his farewell meeting with European leaders this week. Ms Merkel, the US president says, has been his "closest international partner". François Hollande is also saying his goodbyes. So, too, Matteo Renzi and Theresa May. But these three are making up the numbers. The French president will soon be gone, the Italian prime minister faces his own populist revolt and the British premier has time for nothing besides the convulsions promised by Brexit.
Publicly, Mr Obama has sought to offer reassurance. His successor will not abandon the Atlantic alliance, geopolitical realities will impose themselves, the US is unlikely to surrender leadership. So the story goes. Mr Trump's disdain for Nato and his admiration for Mr Putin, however, have roots deeper than the election campaign. Ms Merkel - I watched her speaking to the German employers' federation - is comfortable talking about the values that sustain our civilisation. Mr Trump does deals.
The potential transatlantic collisions speak for themselves. The EU is preparing to renew the sanctions imposed on Mr Putin after Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. Some members of the Union have never been comfortable with the commercial costs of the sanctions. Hungary's authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, prefers to pay homage to Mr Putin. But Ms Merkel has marshalled the 28 behind a common position. To do otherwise would be to concede that, once again, Europe's borders can be changed by force.
A deal between Messrs Trump and Putin to accept Moscow's revanchism would at once overturn the security settlement that has prevailed since 1945 and point to a future in which Europe is divided again between competing spheres of influence. Mr Putin probably does not want to seize the Baltics, Georgia or Belarus. He does want to make sure that Russia's neighbours act only with its permission. Where, in the long term, does this leave Poland, a nation that under its present, reactionary, leadership asks its western partners to underwrite its security even as it repudiates their democratic values?
Mr Trump will not get everything his own way. He has promised to tear up the UN agreement limiting Iran's nuclear programme - a plan that would give hardliners in Tehran the go-ahead to resume efforts to secure a bomb. The president-elect should not expect European governments to follow suit if the US seeks to restore the sanctions regime. Nuclear non-proliferation matters to Europeans. Mr Trump is on record as saying he would be unfussed if Japan or South Korea decided to build their own bombs.
Europe is in a wait-and-see mode. How many of the campaign pledges will carry through into government? The choice looks to be one between a bad outcome and a very bad one. Europeans have struggled for some time to uphold their values against authoritarians without and populists within. The danger now comes from across the Atlantic. It falls to Ms Merkel to speak for what during the past seven decades we have known as the west.
